The Secret to Suc­cess
New research says social-emo­tion­al learn­ing helps stu­dents in every way.
— by Daniel Gole­man

Schools are begin­ning to offer an increas­ing num­ber of cours­es in social and emo­tion­al intel­li­gence, teach­ing stu­dents how to bet­ter under­stand their own emo­tions and the emo­tions of oth­ers.

It sounds warm and fuzzy, but it’s a trend backed up by hard data. Today, new stud­ies reveal that teach­ing kids to be emo­tion­al­ly and social­ly com­pe­tent boosts their aca­d­e­m­ic achieve­ment. More pre­cise­ly, when schools offer stu­dents pro­grams in social and emo­tion­al learn­ing, their achieve­ment scores gain around 11 per­cent­age points.

That’s what I heard at a forum held last Decem­ber by the Col­lab­o­ra­tive for Aca­d­e­m­ic, Social, and Emo­tion­al Learn­ing (CASEL). (Dis­clo­sure: I’m a co-founder of CASEL.) Roger Weiss­berg, the organization’s direc­tor, gave a pre­view of a mas­sive study run by researchers at Loy­ola Uni­ver­si­ty and the Uni­ver­si­ty of Illi­nois, which ana­lyzed eval­u­a­tions of more than 233,000 stu­dents across the coun­try.

We are hon­ored to bring you a guest post by Daniel Gole­man, thanks to our col­lab­o­ra­tion with Greater Good Mag­a­zine, a UC-Berke­ley-based quar­ter­ly mag­a­zine that high­lights ground break­ing sci­en­tif­ic research into the roots of com­pas­sion and altru­ism. Enjoy!

“The steady for­ma­tion of new brain cells in adults may rep­re­sent more than mere­ly a patch­ing up of aging brains, a new study has shown.”

“The new adult brain cells may serve to give the adult brain the same kind of learn­ing abil­i­ty that young brains have while still allow­ing the exist­ing, mature cir­cuit­ry to main­tain sta­bil­i­ty.”

“The researchers found that the new adult neu­rons showed a pat­tern of chang­ing plas­tic­i­ty very sim­i­lar to that seen in brain cells in new­born ani­mals. That is, the new adult brain cells showed a “crit­i­cal peri­od” in which they were high­ly plas­tic before they set­tled into the less plas­tic prop­er­ties of mature brain cells. In new­born ani­mals, such a crit­i­cal peri­od enables an impor­tant, ear­ly burst of wiring of new brain cir­cuit­ry with expe­ri­ence.”

“The researchers also observed in the new adult neu­rons anatom­i­cal evi­dence of the same kind of for­ma­tion of new con­nec­tions that take place in the brains of new­borns as they wire new path­ways in response to expe­ri­ence.”

“They con­clud­ed that “adult neu­ro­ge­n­e­sis may rep­re­sent not mere­ly a replace­ment mech­a­nism for lost neu­rons, but instead an ongo­ing devel­op­men­tal process that con­tin­u­ous­ly reju­ve­nates the mature ner­vous sys­tem by offer­ing expand­ed capac­i­ty of plas­tic­i­ty in response to expe­ri­ence through­out life.”

In short: not only do we know today that the adult brain is capa­ble of cre­at­ing new neu­rons, but this shows that our expe­ri­ence influ­ences what hap­pens to those neu­rons once cre­at­ed. Pret­ty rev­o­lu­tion­ary under­stand­ing, that still needs to per­me­ate through soci­ety and influ­ence our lifestyles and habits.

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